Bridge closure will require detours

Wednesday

Mar 27, 2013 at 2:33 PMMar 27, 2013 at 2:43 PM

Work to begin April 8 on Cleveland Street bridge replacement project

Karen Botakaren.bota@sentinel-standard.com

The Cleveland Street bridge will be closed to traffic starting April 8, and motorists will have to follow posted detours until Nov. 15, as the bridge replacement project and reconstruction of Cleveland Street from East Riverside Drive to the bridge gets underway.

County Highway Engineer Paul Spitzley said the detour around the project will be: Riverside Drive to State Road to Steele Street to Adams Street to Jefferson Street to Main Street to Cleveland Street.

“It will zig zag a little bit, but the reason for that is to stay away from Main Street as much as possible, to avoid the additional heavy traffic in the downtown area,” he said. “That (Cleveland/Riverside) intersection gets 3,500 cars a day. There will be more traffic, and more delays.”

Spitzley told members of the Ionia County Road Commission board at their Wednesday meeting that the first step in the project will be to search for snuffbox mussels, which is on the federal endangered species list and near extinction.

The permit from the state's Department of Environmental Quality requires a biologist to conduct a survey of the riverbed 85 feet up- and downstream to verify whether or not the Epioblasma triquetra, or snuffbox mussel, is present in the riverbed near the bridge. If any are found, they will have to be relocated 500 feet to the east or west of the bridge before construction can proceed, Spitzley said.

The bid for construction was awarded earlier this year to Davis Construction. The cost of the mussel relocation was part of the bidding process.

Plans for the Cleveland Street/Riverside Drive/Kelsey Highway intersection project, which was to be done along with the bridge construction project, had to be scratched due to lack of funding.

Also at their meeting, commissioners viewed the road commission’s newly purchased dump/plow truck. The vehicle, which cost $202,000, replacing one that was recently retired and will be sold at auction, is a fully equipped tandem axle dump with a do-all box, plow, salt spreader, wing and more.

With 1,072 miles of county roads (doubled, when the trucks go one direction and then return) plus 310 lane miles of Michigan Department of Transportation roads, it is important that the road commission have reliable vehicles – and especially reliable snow plows, said ICRC Managing Director Dorothy Pohl.

“You could get to Florida by the time you drive all the snow plow routes,” Pohl said. “When we are running, at best, 24 trucks, that’s a lot of snow plowing to do in a day.”